Predicting Election Winners using Social Media?

I am very much looking forward to the next Canadian federal election. I will be using the wealth of Twitter and other social media data Politwitter has been gathering to try and predict the outcome of the election. Followers will be a big part of that but i'm going to use several other social media metrics.

I hope to not only have a prediction for the winning party nationally, but also a riding by riding prediction. And after the actual election results are known, it will be very interesting to see how accurate the predictions were and if Twitter and social media is a gauge.

If anyone wants to help with this effort, I could sure use it! I spend a lot of time doing the backend programming and database work, which leaves me with limited time to keep the directory of MPs and candidates updated, its a lot of work. Every once and awhile I go on a binge adding as many as I can find, but its time consuming finding each MP or candidates twitter, facebook, blog, youtube and flickr.

I also have a new page listing every riding and it shows which ridings are missing social media info for their local MP and candidates http://politwitter.ca/riding
which is A LOT right now. I've concentrated on MPs on Twitter and only recently added support to add MPs without Twitter but have other social media accounts such as Facebook.

This wasn't a great example but its noteworthy that the recent BC Liberal Leadership race was won by the candidate with the most Twitter followers and Facebook fans. I have the comparison herehttp://politwitter.ca/special/leadbcl (right side)